Monday, August 21, 2006

Venkman

So I found a way to debug Javascript via a Firefox plugin called Venkman. It saved me about 19 more hours of headaches than I already had, and I figure it's a pretty good thing to know about from here on out. When you don't have compile-time errors to go by, you end up guessing and throwing random output back at yourself. "Got here," isn't a terrific way to quickly diagnose problems, especially when an entire block of code whose syntax I was unsure about doesn't seem to be working.

It felt like there were gremlins in there breaking my stuff, before this tool found me, but the authors of Venkman must have seen them as ghosts. Peter would be proud.